Disclosed herein are an apparatus for forming an image and corresponding methods.
In laser printing, such as is employed in a digital copier, a laser beam printer, or the like, laser light is used to expose a photoreceptor in an image wise fashion. In a conventional rotating mirror laser scanner, the exposure pattern is typically binary such that at any given point in the scanned image the laser emitter is either “on” or “off”. Because the emitter is either on or off, certain image quality defects can be produced. To attenuate some of these defects, the addressability of the scanner may be increased.
Some laser printers utilize simultaneous writing with a plurality of laser beams. This could enable higher addressability, higher process speed or both. Typically, the lasers have been arranged such that each beam will scan a different scan line. For example, eight lasers could scan eight scan lines simultaneously. In some applications, multiple beams have been used to overwrite an exposed profile to correct for various non-uniformities such as beam power non-uniformity and misalignment. This typically occurs when a scan line is scanned a second time by a different laser beam during a subsequent scan.